Women's History Month - Day 7

 

Frontierswomen of Central Florida

Miss Bertha Eddy purchased a brand new 1929 Hupmobile

A Women’s History Month Tribute

By Richard Lee Cronin, CroninBooks.com

7 March 2022

 

Day 7

CitrusLAND is observing Women’s History Month by honoring extraordinary central Florida frontierswomen. And as we celebrate Women’s History Month throughout March, we are also promoting each day a local History Museum, listing days and hours of operation.

See our History Museums of the day in this Post

 

 

Miss Bertha #Eddy died at age 86 at Mount Dora on October 26, 1967. The very definition of a Spinster, Bertha, a snowbird for more than 50 years, enjoyed a long happy life managing a large citrus grove every winter and spring, and then either traveling the U. S., or returning home to her Waukon, Iowa home every summer. At the time of her death in 1967, Bertha still owned 12 acres of citrus groves.

Mount Dora Topic reported often on Bertha’s travels, including reporting on her May 9, 1929, trip to Detroit, Michigan, traveling there to “accept delivery of her new Hupmobile.”   

 

Although a winter resident of Mount Dora, Bertha’s historic Orange County grove at Tangerine dates to that town’s founding. Dudley Adams and Bessie Huestis first homesteaded at Tangerine in the 1870s. Bertha Eddy was the daughter of Emily (Huestis) Eddy.

[Further reading: More on the Eddy family, and our next featured frontierswoman, can be found in Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders., by Richard Lee Cronin].

 

 

Unquestionably the best source for Mount Dora area history was the Mount Dora Topic, founded by our next central Florida frontierswoman, an amazing lady who started out by reporting for the Eustis Lake Region newspaper prior to venturing out on her.    

 

 

Edith #Edeburn founded the Mount Dora Topic newspaper in 1915, and although she retired in 1947, her paper’s headline of June 30, 1960, made clear how the newspaper’s management then felt of their founder: “The mother of the Topic died last Sunday.”

Miss Edeburn however not only founded the Mount Dora Topic she was the paper’s first reporter, editor, publisher, typesetter, advertising representative, delivery person, and paper folder. Edith began by having her four-page newspaper printed at Leesburg. She drove the sand-rutted Dixie Highway west to drop off the “copy”, then returned to pick up the completed paper, returning home to personally fold the paper prior to distributing each copy to her subscribers.

Edith Edeburn founded the Mount Dora Topic in 1915 

A graduate of Pennsylvania State College for Women, Edith Edeburn came south to Florida with her parents, settling at Mount Dora after her father had passed. Her first newspaper job was writing a Mount Dora column for Eustis Lake Region paper, but as early as October 11, 1916, the Mount Dora Topic was mentioned in Ocala Evening Star as the source for a headline story regarding a proposed extension of the “Oklawaha Valley Railroad”.

Within a year of start-up, Edith’s Mount Dora Topic had been recognized by its counterparts. In 1919, Edith promoted the founding of a Mount Dora Woman’s Club in her paper, and she became one of the Club’s charter members. She also became a founding member of the Sunshine Circle of the King’s Daughters and was also a member of the Mount Dora Historical Society.

Edith eventually married, to George Keller on October 25, 1924, and the two continued to publish the Mount Dora Topic until their retirement in 1947. George and Edith both died in 1960, and they are buried at Pine Forest in Mount Dora.

[Further reading: Mount Dora: The Lure. The Founding. The Founders., by Richard Lee Cronin].

 

Isaphoenia Cleopatra (Ellington) Speer, in the view of this author, was the most distinguished and influential of central Florida frontierswomen, which is saying a lot, considering the other 99 impressive female resumes in this series. Isaphoenia’s accomplishments not only set a high bar for female pioneers to follow her into the wilderness of central Florida her achievements served too as a blueprint for how central Florida developed during the second half of the 19^th century.

If you were to draw a line connecting Sanford, Maitland, Orlando, Pine Castle, and Kissimmee, the resulting line would represent the main corridor of modern-day central Florida. Pioneers first settled along this path beginning in the 1840s, on the Fort Mellon to Fort Gatlin Road. The trail then became the First Road to Orlando, known too as the Mellonville to Orlando Road. In 1880 South Florida Railroad followed the very same route, as does Sunrail today.

And in 1860, one female, Isaphoenia Cleopatra (Ellington) Speer, owned land at multiple points along this very same route.   

 

Isaphoenia Cleopatra (Ellington) Speer

Photo courtesy Winter Garden Heritage Foundation

A history of Fort Gatlin or Pine Castle without mention of Lady Isaphoenia would be incomplete to say the least. To tell of the origins of the Lake Ivanhoe area without explaining that 160 acres there was first owned by Lady Isaphoenia - would be an injustice to that local history.

This author first introduced Lady Isaphoenia in the very first sentence of the first paragraph of his very first book in 2013, stating then the following: “Lady Isaphoenia arrived in central Florida a wife and mother to five, the youngest not yet then a year old. Within 3 years, and after giving birth to her sixth child, Isaphoenia began accumulating land, lots of land! This intriguing lady’s true story is fascinating, especially when considering the pivotal, albeit long overlooked role she played in a developing Central Florida.” CitrusLAND: Curse of Florida’s Paradise, (2013); and Second Edition, 2016.

Isaphoenia arrived in central Florida in 1854, coming with her husband, James G. Speer. That same year, Orange County’s coastal beaches and all land east of the St. Johns River was removed from Orange County and made part of a new Volusia County. Half of Orange County’s citizens of 1850 became residents of Volusia County in 1854, leaving 250 or so brave souls to populate 3,000 square miles of Orange County’s smaller – yet still sizeable wilderness.

Orange County of 1854 had NO city. There were NO roads to speak of – only sand-rutted trails accessible via horse, ox team, or walking. Coming ashore at Mellonville, on the south shore of Lake Monroe, near where Sanford is today, the Speer family followed a trail inland 1.5 miles to an abandoned Army fortress named Reid. There, the Speer’s found the first of two stores in all Orange County, the second being a bit further south - like 20 dirt miles south – where a remote settlement – in two years – was to become the Village of Orlando.

That was Orange County of 1854 – no town and only two stores in a land of 3,000 square miles of free-ranging cows, a few log cabins, lots of palmetto brush - and far too many sandspurs.

Isaphoenia C, (Ellington) Speer and husband James Gamble Speer are most often associated with the history of Orlando and West Orange County’s Oakland, but history ignores an intriguing and mysterious association with 160 acres she owned at Lake Ivanhoe, and another 160 acres at Lake Pineloch. The latter property served, literally, as a gateway to the origins of settlements at Fort Gatlin and Pine Castle. The Fort Mellon to Fort Gatlin trail, the main road to Fort Gatlin until the mid-1870s, crossed property belonging to Lady Isaphoenia, acquired before the Civil War, in 1860.

[Further Reading: CitrusLAND: Curse of Florida’s Paradise, and First Road to Orlando, both by Richard Lee Cronin.]

OUR HISTORY MUSEUM OF THE DAY

 

Winter Garden Heritage Foundation Museum

Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11 AM to 3 PM

21 East Plant Street, Winter Garden, FL